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+--- Thread: Activision Blizzard Secretly Watermarking World of Warcraft Users (/thread-14166.html)
Activision Blizzard Secretly Watermarking World of Warcraft Users - Magicbag - 09-11-2012
I played for over 5 years and enjoyed my time. I'm not trolling, just trying to be informative if people have potential concerns over this stuff or just want to know what's going on.
Basically any posted screen shots from WOW contain a watermark pattern with your user IDs, the time the screenshot was captured and the IP address of the server you were on at the time. This has been happening since at least 2008.
links:
http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-warcraft-general/375573-looking-inside-your-screenshots.html
http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/09/11/149228/activision-blizzard-secretly-watermarking-world-of-warcraft-users
RE: Activision Blizzard Secretly Watermarking World of Warcraft Users - shoju - 09-11-2012
Is it decipherable by hackers? I mean, it's a pretty large leap to say that it's a "hackable" exploitable piece of information. I can't get any of the images to come up large enough to actually take a look at it, and see if the patterns mean something. I'm not signing up for an account so that I can see the "large" pictures.
If it is like a QR code in its makeup, wouldn't that mean that it's probably something that only Blizz has a "thing" for?
And the next question, is why does setting your screenshots to max quality make it go away?
RE: Activision Blizzard Secretly Watermarking World of Warcraft Users - LavCat - 09-11-2012
If you use a screen shot to document some abusive action to report to Blizzard it would certainly help to have the information embedded. It does not bother me that they do this. However I believe they should have documented that they embed the information.
RE: Activision Blizzard Secretly Watermarking World of Warcraft Users - Magicbag - 09-11-2012
Well if interested players can discover this then hackers can too. If they didn't before, then they most certainly have now. Maybe Blizz did this for a good reason, but this information has the potential be abused.
For example:
Not that I'm affected, but I know plenty of people who played at work. Fire up a matching script and you have a list of user IDs with timestamps documenting poor conduct. I'm sure with the right circumstances that can be monetized.
RE: Activision Blizzard Secretly Watermarking World of Warcraft Users - shoju - 09-11-2012
Well, there are plenty of ways to determine the "arrangement" of the data, but until someone is able to provide me with a readout of the data, there isn't much that can be done, as what it looks like does indeed seem to be more of a QR Code base.